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Topekan remains positive after ill-fated cruise

Klausman, buddies vow to sail again despite 'Cruise to Hell'

Topekan Brett Klausman (right) and Joe Perkin (in baseball cap) talk to CNN's Erin Burnett and Martin Savidge after disembarking Thursday night from the disabled Carnival Triumph, a cruise ship that lost power in a fire and had to be towed to port in Mobile, Ala.

Brett Klausman got off the crippled cruise ship Triumph with his humor, if not all of his dignity, intact.

“That gave a whole new meaning to the term poop deck,” the Topeka man told CNN interviewers Erin Burnett and Martin Savidge after disembarking Thursday night from what is now being called the Cruise to Hell.

Triumph is the Carnival Line cruise ship that lost power and the ability to provide essential services when a fire erupted Sunday night on the third of a planned four-day Caribbean cruise. There were no injuries from the fire, but the powerless passengers dealt with backed-up toilets, sewage in the interior halls, awful smells and limited food availability before the 14-story ship limped under tugboat power into port at Mobile, Ala., late Thursday.

As one of the first of more than 4,000 passengers to be allowed off the floating community, cruise veteran Klausman — identified as a Platnum Level member by his friend, Joe Perkin — told interviewers that passengers held up surprisingly well under awful circumstances.

“After all was said and done, people were really quite nice to each other — not chippy at all,” Klausman told CNN. “It worked out as well as could be expected.”

Klausman and Perkin, a friend from Kansas City, admittedly were luckier than many others on the ship.

“We actually had our bathroom working most of the time, which was good for us but bad for a lot of others,” he explained upon arriving home Friday night in Topeka. “It was trying at first, then it was up and down, but you got used to it. You learned to just wait until it worked again.

“The hard thing was trying to sleep at night because the (interior) rooms were so darn hot. But we were lucky again in that some people across the hall had access to a deck, and they kept the doors open to let some air in.”

Klausman, a lifelong Topekan whose Midwest Health family business deals in assisted-living centers and home care, said a helpful Carnival crew kept passengers fed and hydrated as best as they could.

“There were a lot of jokes about onion and zucchini sandwiches, and you wondered how long the smoked salmon had been sitting around,” he said. “But, it could have been a lot worse.”

It was the fourth time Klausman and a group of buddies had cruised together, he told CNN. Unlike some passengers who told reporters someone else could use the free cruise Carnival offered as compensation, he and Perkin said they wouldn’t hesitate to sail again.

“There will be a fifth trip,” Perkin vowed. “We will be back.”

“As long as our wives allow it,” Klausman added quickly.

“That’s in question at this point,” Perkin agreed.

Klausman credited his wife, Liz, with making the final leg of his long return home easier.

Rather than take the Carnival offer of an eight-hour bus ride back to Galveston, Texas, the departure point for the cruise, or to the airport in Houston, Liz Klausman booked her husband a flight from Mobile to Kansas City, Mo.

“That was the worst part — not knowing how long you were going to be away from your family,” Klausman said of his wife and two young sons — Chase, 4 and Connor, almost 2,